First Cell Benchmarks

Not really it's a fair opinion. Just like some people think the Wii is a Novelty.

I think the cell is powerful i'm not bias i just don't think it's what most people are making it out to be (When considering gaming.

The way it is being portrayed is as if we will see movie like graphics soon. I think we will see very good graphics out of the PS3 but i wouldn't get too over hyped. Im not convinced that it will exceed the X360's visual potentials.

 

You're bringing in elements that have nothing to do with this thread and attempting to start implications that have nothing to do with this particular section of the console forum. Please refrain

 

My opinion:
Cell like architectures are a clear conceptual win over what's come before.
As far as Cell itself goes, I'll wait until devs have more time with it before I declare it a performance success, failure, or break even (with a $1 billion investment). Certainly there are loads that cell does very well with, but they generally they're the same types of loads a gpu does well with, gpgpu may win out over cell or vice versa. Cell in ps3 as opposed to some other cpu will probably end up being the better choice for the ps3, but I'm more concerned about what gets adopted by the scientific research community. (since the ps3 design decisions are already done, but where computing as a whole goes in the next few years is still unknown)

 

In general, the PPE is similar in performance to 1 Xenon core. I believe the latter has some extended VMX instructions, 128 registers but more limited hardware threading (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

The SPE has an SIMD engine strapped to it and you don't need double precision for gaming ? It's faster than the PPE when the local store is used effectively, and there are 7 of them in PS3. Use the search to find comments from the devs on SPE.

 

Wait so the Wii's CPU comparable to a 2 ghz Pentium 4?

It's drystone was over 1600 dmips as well.

Sorry to go off topic..

 

That Wii dhrystone number was obviously just fabricated by using the GameCube CPUs dhystone number. 1125 Dmips @ 485mhz = 1691 Dmips @ 729mhz.

Dhrystone numbers only tell us one small part of the performance story. They only tell us about integer performace - there are no floating point operations in that benchmark. Wii's CPU should theoretically show good results in the Dhrystone thanks in part to the fact it's an Out-Of-Order CPU.

But PS3 has 8 cores, 360 has 3, Wii only has 1. In that PS3 dhrystone number above, that is just the PPU's Drystone number - only a small fraction of the full capability of the chip. And of course when it comes to floating point performance, Wii's CPU performance is completely dwarfed by single core
performance of either a Cell or Xenon CPU.

 

Thanks but that's not what i asked.

I said is the Wii's CPU comparable to a a 2 ghz pentium 4?

Oh and why would you think the Wii dmips number would be made up?

BTW, I was already aware that floating point calculations are not included in dhrystone and that one of the main reasons why the ps3 uses spies is because it inflats the systems floating point numbers dramactically.

I just wanted to know how it stacks up to the pentium 4 at 2ghz and the Main ps3 CPU without the spies in general performanec but I seemed to have answered my own question.

 

No.

Because no one has ever actually run and published a Dhystone score for the Wii CPU. People with access to the machines are under NDA. The Gamecube on the otherhand, people have run Linux on. And people have benchmarked it.

SPUs also "inflate" integer performance by the same logic. Thinking that SPUs only are good at floating point operations is a misunderstanding.

 

Is your paper online? If so or if not, please share

 

Ha ha. I never said that. I said "one of the main reasons" Not the only reason.

 

True, each SPE tends to be a lot faster then PPE in general use.

Dhrystone is not exactly a very meaningful metric.

 

Guys you see this ?

http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=7241&sid=0561e4763337ae57f860e5e87983900e

(please lock if old)

 

Cell SDK 2.1 released

http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/powerarchitecture?entry=sdks_from_alphaworks_cell_be

 

For those who are keen on this sort of things...

The other Cell 'versus' thread prompted me to take another quick look at what's out there now. I focused my search on Toshiba and found some more Cell open source software info:

On CE Linux (Linux in embedded products)...

* "Cell related Open Source Activities and PS3 as Cell Development" by Hiroyuki Machida -- Dated December 8, 2006 (Japan Technical Jamboree #12)

* "Cell broadband engine, SPE assisted user space device driver" by Hiroyuki Machida et al.
-- Dated February 22nd (Thu), 2007 (Japan Technical Jamboree #13)

* Sijam (Some Japanese company specializing in Cell related developement -- among other things): http://blog.cell.sijam.com/cell/linux/ (http://blog.cell.sijam.com/). Contains some info about Toshiba's Celleb reference platform.

Translated link: http://translate.google.com/transla...&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=/language_tools

 

http://dl.alphaworks.ibm.com/technologies/cellsw/cellFMwhitepaper.pdf

financial market applications on CELL with comparison with x86 multi core

Maybe it is needing a new thread.

 

Hmm, looks like 6/7 SPEs is the where the dramatic performance improvements seem to stop.
Maybe there was a method to Sony's madness at cutting an SPE.

 

I think you are reading the graph wrong.

Speed up every time you add a SPU is almost perfectly linear (and even super linear in some cases)

It's just the completion time that looks logarithmic. Because obviously just as going from 50 secs to 25secs is doubling the performance, going from 5 seconds to 2.5 seconds is doubling performance. Only getting 25 secs faster "looks better" on that graph than going from 5 to 2.5.

 

Most probably.

 

Somewhat coincidentally, Fraunhofer ITWM will be showing some stuff running on a PS3 cluster next week, including financial apps.

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/1627281.html